Attaching EL

Battery

Before attaching your lights, remember to place the battery in a convenient location… a pocket, perhaps? It has to stay somewhere all Halloween night, and you probably don’t want it dangling in midair!

If you can’t comfortably wire the lights through your costume, you may need to visit our section on “soldering” below!

The wire

From our experience, there are two routes for attaching EL: sewing, and glue.

Sewing works great on clothing because it securely holds wires in multiple locations. Movement can easily break glue, but thread will secure the lights without breaking in the event of a costume dance battle.

Glue (whether hot, super, or epoxy) works better on hard surfaces. It’s far easier to use than thread, and should remain strong on hard materials that won’t shift. When you don’t need thread, use glue!

Soldering

At this point, hopefully, you’re finished! The wire has been attached and strung, everything is in place…

But sometimes that’s not the case!

You may need/want to lengthen the battery wire, or extend the EL lights to another place without sending the light itself through your costume. To do so, you’ll have to employ the magic of soldering.

Into the darkness

Okay, it’s really not that bad! Soldering just means connecting wires with “solder,” a metal that has an unusually low melting point. For this part of the project, you’ll want something like a soldering iron kit.

There you have it: soldering is soldering. You attach one wire to another.

However, it may be hard to find those wires with EL wire. There are a number of layers:

Let’s travel from the outer shell to the center:

1. Pink plastic. This layer both protects the underlying components and adds the color.

2. Clear plastic. The clear plastic layer insulates the outer wire.

3. Outer wire. The one poking up in the picture.

4. Phosphor. Under the clear plastic, there’s a layer of phosphor excited by the central wire. You’ll need to scrape this away in order to solder the central wire.

5. Central wire. The main attraction: in our picture, it’s at the very end of the EL wire.

This may take some experimentation on your first try, so give yourself an extra half-inch. First use wire cutters to strip the pink plastic (be warned, it’s pretty tough). Then, slice the clear plastic away until you can pull the outer wire away. Finally, head to the end of the EL wire and strip the phosphor away from the central wire. The result should look something like the picture above.

Guess what? You now have two wires ready! Solder them to extension wire and protect the result with heat shrink tubing. It’s a wrap!

(And again, don’t try to solder EL tape or panels. We destroyed two pieces of tape and received multiple electrical shocks before learning that lesson.)

Conclusion

EL lights take costumes to the next level. Before we discovered the glory of electroluminescence, we always wanted to be the cool kid at the party with a light-up costume but assumed the process for using lights would be too hard. But no longer!